Re: REVISED PROPOSAL regarding DFSG 3 and 4, licenses, and modifiable text

[Henning Makholm <henning@makholm.net>]

Scripsit Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au>

> So, presumably the reason we like modifiability for programs is so that:
[...]
> For docs, this means things like:
[...]

Excellent summary.

> Hrm. Actually, I can't see any invariant sections in the emacs21 manual,
> apart from the GPL and the GFDL themselves. Am I blind? Well, apparently
> I just don't know how to use info, the invariant sections are listed in
> the info file, but I can't get emacs to show them to me. Weird.

What I have locally is the Emacs 20 manual, which is not under GDFL
but says (when I look at emacs.info with less)

| Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of
| this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided also
| that the sections entitled "The GNU Manifesto", "Distribution" and "GNU
| General Public License" are included exactly as in the original, and
| provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the
| terms of a permission notice identical to this one.

I have been assuming for the discussion that the GNU Manifesto is
still invariant in later versions of the manual. For those who like
to count bytes, the manifesto takes up some 25 KB of text in info
format.

> So anyway. The only time I can imagine them being a problem is if you
> convert the manual to online help on a system that's very pressed for
> space.

I imagine the problem of borrowing a few pages of technical
documentation for another project, but then being stuck with 25 KB of
political proselytizing.

> Possibly the same thing could be done for things like the GNU manifesto.
> It certainly doesn't need to be in the online help,

According to the license text above, it does (and also according to
what I can remember from the GFDL).

> Well, what problems do you see in us having unmodifiable text in
> /usr/share/emacs/20.7/etc/GNU?

The problems I am worried about are not so much about having
unmodifiable text as such (as long as it is not technically
important), it's having the unmodifiable text tied to technically
relevant text (such as technical documentation).

-- 
Henning Makholm                   "The great secret, known to internists and
                         learned early in marriage by internists' wives, but
               still hidden from the general public, is that most things get
         better by themselves. Most things, in fact, are better by morning."